Weekend o' poker, part I - Friday

Alright, since my computer is acting up and doesn't want to let me get to my email, I suppose that means I can post the first part of this crazy poker weekend.

I wasn't planning on going to the boats on Friday, because I needed to be at a vestry retreat at 9 am on Saturday, and playing poker on Friday night means not getting home until at least 3am on an early night, and is usually more like 4 or 4:30 am. But, around 7 pm, I decided to be irresponsible and gave in to the desire to play poker anyway. I gave my friends Adam a call and let him know I was going and if he wanted to play, I'd stake him into the game. He said he wasn't sure what the plans were, but he'd call me on my cell and let me know.

I get to the boats around 8:30, and am pretty surprised to see Mark there, as he'd mentioned last weekend that he wouldn't be here this weekend and then next weekend he hoped to be in Vegas, and the weekend after that I was going to be in Vegas. He was sitting in the CMG when I wandered over and teased him about being there and didn't he have a lot of work to do? He said he absolutely did, but he was being irresponsible (not to repeat myself but that was the phrase he used) and playing poker instead. I sweated him for a bit, but looked down at his stack and he was unusually for him, short stacked. Noticing my look, he said he wasnted to try playing on a small stack and see if he could manage, and he was pissing the guys he ususally plays with off because he'd changed up his style.

At this point, my name gets called for a new must-move baby NL game, so I grab some chips and sit down. I'm first on the move list, so there's no point in trying to build any table image, and besides that, I'm waiting for the $400 min / $1k max game to start up anyway. I make about $40 in the 15-20 min that I'm sitting at the table and then get moved to a main game with one of the $400 min regulars. About 2 hands after I sit down, I get JJ UTG+1, UTG folds, I raise to $25 (BB = $5 in this game), and I get 3 callers, including the SB. Fan-fing-tastic, because JJ does not look so great against 3 other people.

The flop comes down T♥ 7♥ 5♥ Great, this is good on one side because I've got an overpair, but bad because, well, hello, flush on board. I do have the J♥ though, so I can bet to see where I am.

I bet $75, everyone folds to the SB, who says he's all in. At this point, I only have $130 behind, so it's $130 to win $385. He's the SB, so if he's got a flush, I don't think it's bigger than my J or he wouldn't have pushed it this hard, and at some point I need to double up my stack in order to play this game. I call.

Turn is a 3♣ River is a 5♦ I flip over my JJ, and he flips over his T7o and says "two pair!" and taps his cards to indicate to the dealer to ship him the pot. The dealer says, "Two pair, jacks and fives," at the same I'm telling the SB, "Yes, me too." Ship it!

His next comment to me was something on the order of a sarcastic "ooooh nice call on the flop there." Instead of saying something like "yeah, nice call of the pre-flop raise there." I merely say something about having the flush draw as well as I'm stacking his chips.

I then proceed to bleed off $100 in cards that start off well but the flops absolutely miss me, but when my seat is called for the new $400 / $1000 game about 20 minutes later, I've still managed to leave with a double up of my buyin.

... to be continued ...